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Dark Forest Internet

I’ve been enjoying venkat rao’s recent musings on The Extended Internet Universe. In last weeks breaking smart newsletter he wrote the following: 

For several years now, I’ve been watching the creeping, unheralded growth of what I call the cozyweb, and for which others have lots of creative names. Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler called it the Dark Forest in a recent post.

Unlike the main public internet, which runs on the (human) protocol of “users” clicking on links on public pages/apps maintained by “publishers”, the cozyweb works on the (human) protocol of everybody cutting-and-pasting bits of text, images, URLs, and screenshots across live streams. Much of this content is poorly addressable, poorly searchable, and very vulnerable to bitrot. It lives in a high-gatekeeping slum-like space comprising slacks, messaging apps, private groups, storage services like dropbox, and of course, email.

In recent years i’ve been dropping further and further into the Dark Forest Internet myself. My online life is spread thin across slacks, discords, telegram, signal, mailing lists, youtube and of course podcasts. All mediated and made bearable by plugins like distraction free youtube and demetricator extensions.

In Strickler’s piece introducing the term, he says:

Spaces where depressurized conversation is possible because of their non-indexed, non-optimized, and non-gamified environments. The cultures of those spaces have more in common with the physical world than the internet.

His primary concern in the essay seems to be the distinction between dark forest spaces and the mainstream. I honestly haven’t read the word mainstream used so many times in one article since the turn of the century reading adversarial opinion columns in DIY punk zines. Rather than focusing on the dark forest i wanted to think a bit more about ‘the mainstream’ and what it means for me: 

“Mainstream” is a fuzzy term/word, under defined and useful in its nebulousness. The dictionary definition isn’t much help either: The ideas, attitudes, or activities that are shared by most people and regarded as normal or conventional. 

I grew up in a small town and spent my teenage years inside the DIY punk scene. It was an a sometimes threatening world with dangers of being Beaten up in the park for being a mosher, or being chased along dark sea walls by kids trying to run us over with their mopeds.

Because of this i’ve never been in the mainstream. DIY not EMI and More Amps Less Angst were the watchwords inside the fading world of the 90’s GenX dark forest

I don’t like sports, I hate nearly all television, I don’t listen to the radio, I don’t like movies – especially going to the cinema – and as such i’m entirely ignorant of the entire phenomenon of what appear to be deeply infantile children’s movies being marketed to adults as high culture. Otherwise known as the marvel cinematic universe: I’ve seen iron man 1 and about 10 mins of a movie where captain America beat up some dudes in a lift. 

As my friend jenny likes to say ‘you literally don’t know anything about anything”. And its true. All this shouldn’t be read as a boast on my part – just a fact of how i live my life – sometimes it’s embarrassing around other people.

Reddit calls itself the front page of the internet. But I don’t go on that site either. The insanity vortex that is the bird site sometimes feels like the mainstream. But that’s because it has such a outsized influence on journalists. Speaking of which, with falling revenues and readership i have no idea why newspapers still consider themselves part of the conventional media ecology. I have friends with youtube channels that reach more people daily than newspaper circulations.

I see the mainstream breakthrough into my life sometimes when i sneak a peek at youtubes trending page. It’s a hell list that for me right now includes: A call of duty advert, an advert for a another rambo movie, some cricket thing, a bunch of football wank, a slew of people all reviewing the same smartphone and clips from a bunch of talent shows i haven’t ever seen. Its a fever dream of a society that i don’t recognise or have any part in.

Towards the end of his dark forests piece Strickler warns the following:

 (T)hose of us building dark forests risk underestimating how powerful the mainstream channels will continue to be, and how minor our havens are compared to their immensity.

Personally, I am under no illusions about the how powerful the mainstream is. I’m aware of it, i understand, I don’t underestimate it. But I have been outside of it most of my life so I just don’t care about it. 

Now, those that know me would known that this is not to say that i don’t care about issues and causes that don’t effect me, that’s what the mechanisms of personal ethics and solidarity is for. Political life is very separate from the nebulous ‘mainstream’ but i’m not sure i have time to articulate why.  

One of the things that seems to hover unspoken around the dark forest internet is the web 2.0 term ‘filter bubble’ and we could also loop in the Specter of radicalisation too.

I’m not sure how to deal with that but it’s clear that as people drift away from algorithmically mediated spaces out in the light and open web into the deep web dark forest: Friends shouldn’t let friends go into the woods alone.